Talks about The Poison Garden

Introduction

Poisonous plants are not likely to be first choice for many
people if asked what they would like to hear a talk about but my
experience is that, once people have
heard a few stories about these plants, they want to hear
more. A fair proportion of mytalks, these days, are return visits to
groups I've visited before.

A Talk about All the Plants

When I first set out to see how to offer more information to
people I thought I would give a talk
covering all the poisonous plants with the facts, fiction and
folklore about them but it soon became
clear that such a talk would run for up to four hours. I
decided to fragment the subject and it seemed logical to do that
division by a topic area.

Speaking to the Hungerford & District Community Arts Festival
in 2016.

Out of that came the present package of talks but there are
a number of other areas which would lend themselves to a separate
talk and the programme is likely to increase.

The following is a brief insight into the talks on
offer. Please see the right-hand column for details of how to
book one of these talks for your organisation.

Lethal Lovelies

This is as close to an all encompassing talk as it is possible to
get without going over the forty-five minutes to an hour time span
which seems to be the norm for most purposes.

The basis of the talk is to look at the three ways to avoid being
harmed by a poisonous plant; don't touch, don't eat, don't sniff.
This is followed by a look at the most notorious of the plants and a
brief overview of the issues surrounding the misuse of the
substances the psychoactive plants contain.

The actual plants featured are mostly the same but the time spent
on each and the stories told vary from talk to talk and there are
people who have heard 'Lethal Lovelies' more than once and say that
no two talks are ever the same.

Medical Murderers

There is something ghoulish in all of us so it isn't surprising
that many people want to hear about the use of poisonous plants as a
murder weapon.

Again, to try and cover all the many ways the plants have been
used to kill would produce a training course not a one off talk so I
decided to focus on the medical professionals who have used the
plants as their weapons.

This does more than simply restrict the territory to be covered so that
the talk can be kept to a reasonable length. As our knowledge grows
it becomes more difficult to obtain and use both the plants and the
extracts from them so, increasingly, poisoning is the domain of the
expert and, by limiting the theme to medically trained murderers, it
is possible to include the most famous serial killer of the 20th
century.

But there is more to 'Medical Murderers' than just satisfying
ghoulish curiosity. By asking why and how these killers were able to
function, the talk is also a thought-provoking look at what we
believe and why we trust some people and not others.

Lethal
Ladies

There’s a popular notion that poison is a woman’s weapon.
This stems from the idea that women are fragile creatures who
can’t bear to look their victims in the eye and so rely on a
murder weapon that takes time AND the view that because women
are the sole preparers of food they have the opportunity to
administer poisons with dinner. Such ideas are not just wrong
today; they have always been wrong. In my talk ‘Medical
Murderers’ I feature ten men and only two women.

When I received a request to give a presentation just about
female poisoners, however, I did find plenty to talk about by
including those lethal ladies who used metallic poisons like
arsenic and mercury as well as those who relied on plant based
substances.

The talk was sufficiently well received for me to add it to
repertoire and I've already taken bookings for both it and a
longer form talk that combines Medical Murderers and Lethal
Ladies.

Murderous Morphine

Click on the arrow to watch a short video edited from the full Medical Murderers talk concentrating on the use of morphine as a murder weapon.

Who Wants to be a Murderer?

Though drawing on a number of the cases used in 'Medical
Murderers', the approach of this talk is a little more light-hearted
and, in particular, looks at the historical reaction to death which
enabled so many murders to go undetected. It also questions our
complacency and asks whether murder could still be all around us.

The 'Phantastica'

'Phantastica' is a term coined by
Doctor Louis Lewin to embrace
all the substances, mostly plant derived, which affect the human
brain in any way.

This talk is about the best known of those plants and looks at
why we use them, how we use them and what the real harms they can cause
are as opposed to those harms which exist only in the headlines.

Showing how juicy deadly nightshade berries are at HADCAF 2016

Though dealing with a serious subject, the talk has its lighter
moments and is an entertaining way to get the audience thinking for
themselves about the issues surrounding substance abuse.

It is suitable for all age groups and has held the attention of
teenagers and grandparents alike.

War and Remembrance

This is a more specialised talk intended for use around the time
of November 11th and Remembrance Sunday. It looks as the
plants which have had a role in warfare, or the justification for
waging war, and follows a timeline from the Roman invasion of
Britain through to the present 'war on terror' and the troops
fighting in the poppy fields of Afghanistan.

Poisonous Plants in Your Local Area

Whilst usually including many of the plants whose stories are
told in 'Lethal Lovelies', the idea of this talk is to feature
plants that the audience will find in their own gardens or local
parks and countryside.

Poisonous Plants and the Bible

I originally set out to prepare a talk on poisonous plants IN the
Bible but soon found that it is impossible to be sure exactly which
plants are being referred to. By changing 'IN' to 'AND' I could
avoid making claims that are hard to defend and I could include
those plants that have had a biblical connection grafted onto them
though there is no Bible story that refers to them.

Other Talks

There are a number of other subject areas which could easily be
covered. Everything from plants in Shakespeare,
in literature generally to plants that poison horses or other
specific animals. In time, more of these subject areas will
become the topic for a talk.